1. Field of the Invention
The invention generally relates to the field of data mining and, more particularly, to a system and a computer-implemented method of detecting relationships by creating input files of text patterns for each type of relationship, identifying a specific text pattern within a text-based document, tagging proper names in the text-based document, and extracting those proper names located within the specific text pattern so as to identify the two entities in the relationship.
2. Description of the Related Art
Recently, there has been a rapid growth of on-line discussion groups and news websites on the World Wide Web (WWW). Detecting relationships between entities (e.g., buyer/seller, employee/employer, partnerships, parent/subsidiaries, etc.) discussed on those websites could prove to be a valuable resource (e.g., to a company investigating a rival company's business dealings, to a company or individual investigating a prospective client, employee, or contractor, etc.). However, the task of manually detecting such relationships from amongst the large corpus of documents contained on the Web is laborious. Thus, there is a need for a system and computer-implemented method for automatically and accurately detecting relationships in unstructured text contained within electronic documents with minimal processing times so as to be scalable to large document sets. The challenge is both in identifying entities in a document and in detecting the particular relationship, if any, between two entities.